When the Major League Baseball owners withheld a nearly $8 million payment to the players’ union’s pension and benefit plan in 1994, it provoked the strike in 1994 and did damage to baseball’s relationship to fans that it has never entirely recovered from. All the ephemeral, social and metaphorical overlays that made baseball resonant were revealed to be irrelevant as far as owners were concerned, who fought to have the players solve the problems caused by their own spending. Baseball’s about money, which is something we all knew but could overlook in favor of the narratives that made it meaningful. What the owners made clear is that this is a game played by millionaires for the benefit of billionaires, and that we our emotional involvement with teams is only of interest in that it makes us more willing consumers.

The music business similarly changed its relationship to music fans when it stopped selling singles. Suddenly, the only way to get the songs fans liked and once paid a few bucks for was to pay $17 for the album and all the songs they didn’t care about. The industry made the capitalist relationship the governing relationship instead of the fan/artist one, and that dynamic is fundamentally adversarial as the company tries to get the most money possible from buyers and consumers tried to get the best deal possible. With the emotional and other social constructs minimized, it’s no surprise that Napster and free downloads – the best deal! – emerged. Instead of fostering and nurturing the artist/fan link, it went so far as to prosecute it’s audience. The damage to the business as been well-documented.

Clearly, the stories we tell ourselves are important ways of making transactions in capitalist arenas palatable, even desirable and important. Our enduring desire for social relationships in spite of recent history helps explain the interest in baseball’s playoffs and the 200,000 people who bought Lil Wayne’s leftovers on I am Not a Human Being. We’d really rather focus on the reasons we consumed a good instead of having our attention drawn to consuming relationship.

The occasion for these thoughts isn’t the start of baseball’s playoff season but a review of Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land written by Terry Eagleton for Harper’s. Judt’s book is on the decline of social democracy in America, and these examples are symptoms of the larger concern he sees. As Eagleton writes, paraphrasing Judt:

“The problem with market societies is that they erode the symbolic, affective dimensions of social existence, and thus have little chance of grappling their underlings to them with hoops of steel. They rely instead on the self-interest of their subjects. But self-interest is a notoriously faithless, fickle affair. It may inspire you to kick someone in the teeth as much as vote him into power.”